Lily White (34 page)

She knew she was getting overemotional. It was not as if Jazz would meet some limpid-eyed beauty at the country club’s New Year’s Eve dance and immediately realize the error of his ways. Actually, Lee conceded, that
was
it. The lump in her throat grew so large it forced tears out of her eyes. A drop slipped from her cheek onto the T-shirt and made a sad little mark. All fumpfed up, that’s what she was. Fumpfed—or something like it—was a Greta word. It seemed to mean something like filled with grief. It was a word she and Robin could never pronounce. But when one of them got upset, the other used to say, in a cruelly comic German accent: You are all fumpfed up.

Lee was so fumpfed up she did not notice that Jazz had come in. When he sat beside her on the bed—on top of her T-shirt, actually—she gave a too loud hoot of surprise.

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you heard me come in.”

“No. I was so spaced out …” Her voice was excessively husky, she noticed, a combination of a constricted throat and a need to fight fire with fire and best the blonde hussy from Rolling Hills Country Club.

But such tactics were not necessary. When Jazz saw her tears, his eyes filled as well. They sat beside each other on the single, lumpy dormitory bed. Then they wept. “It’s only for ten days,” Lee managed to say. Not two seconds later, Jazz said the same thing back to her. “Why are we carrying on like this?” she demanded.

“Beats the hell out of me,” he said, checking out the ceiling in the embarrassed way men do when they discover themselves crying. After a second, he added: “Maybe …”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe we’re all upset because our being apart is a crime against nature.” Lee started to laugh, but her nose began dripping so fiercely she settled for a fast guffaw. “I’m serious,” Jazz continued. “We were meant to be with each other. You and I … we’re a given in natural law.”

“Lee and Jazz. Axiomatic.”

“Exactly,” he agreed, without her irony. “And to be apart on Christmas is the worst. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because the two of us, we’re more family to each other than our own families are.”

From there, it seemed only logical that the following afternoon, as soon as Jazz finished his Antitrust final, they visited Dr. Donald Humm, an internist known to the students around NYU for his fondness for writing prescriptions. He did the blood test. And a mere three telephone calls later, Judge Susan Margules Steinhardt, the august, cerebral New York State Supreme Court justice presiding in the Howie the Hose extortion proceedings,
said that indeed she did remember Lee as the student intern from the previous summer—first-rate demeanor, so rare these days—and yes, she would be delighted to marry the couple Monday at noon in chambers and wasn’t it, um, adventurous that the two of them were eloping and—no problem at all—she’d be pleased to read Shakespeare’s one hundred sixteenth sonnet (her husband had in fact recited it to her while they were courting) and wasn’t it romantic that they were going to spend their honeymoon in St. Bart’s. Romantic and lovely. Just lovely.

It looked lovely: tropical twilight of Christmas Eve, coconut palms arching protectively over the pink villa with a red tile roof. An instant later, there was Sylvia meeting them at the front door, looking crisper than crisp in a white trouser suit with gold braiding—an officer in the world’s most
au courant
navy. Her sleek champagne hair, now cut Cleopatra style, gleamed in the light of a chandelier consisting of six frosted-glass pineapples. Her flawlessly mascaraed lashes fluttered instinctively at the sight of Jazz, square-jawed and breathtakingly broad-shouldered in a well-worn blue blazer. Sylvia’s lips, a juicy mango, pursed to kiss Lee, although she did not apply them to her daughter’s cheek; instead she touched the side of her face lightly against Lee’s and tweeted in the direction of the back of the house. Then, as if responding to some sharp command, she stepped back precisely eighteen inches: the perfect distance so her outfit could be observed in full, yet not a detail missed. Only then did she extend her hand to Jazz. “Jasper,” she whispered tenderly.

“I hope you don’t mind my horning in on your Christmas, Mrs. White.” Lee looked up at him, at the sharp angles of his jaw, at his clear eyes and slightly-smaller-than-average nose, and knew, instantly, that had he had a Ph.D. in psychology and written his dissertation on the convolutions of the psyche of Sylvia Bernstein White, he could not have articulated a better sentence
than the one he had just spoken. “Horning in” was something you could really get away with only after your tenth generation in America. “Christmas” of course was a word only his kind could pronounce perfectly, with that loving familiarity: their word. And the “Mrs. White” was masterful icing on the wedding cake: incredibly courteous, inviting immediate correction.

“Please! Call me Mom.” Suddenly the woman Lee had known all her life disappeared. Snooty flared nostrils and puckered lips were replaced by soft diffidence. “Unless you’d rather call me Sylvia.”

“I’d love to call you Mom,” Jazz replied. Simultaneously, they moved in to kiss each other, then took a perfectly choreographed step back and smiled. In that same instant, Sylvia took her daughter’s hand and stroked it. What amazed Lee was her mother’s velvety warmth. She had expected a body temperature that was degrees cooler than normal human flesh.

Sylvia gave her daughter a benevolent smile and Lee found herself beaming back so broadly that for all she knew, her uvula was exposed. She could not help the peace that touched every part of her. Such utter peace that it made the transcendental meditative state she had managed to achieve twice in her junior year seem like a Led Zeppelin concert. Her every nerve felt soothed, her every muscle slack. For that moment, Lee no longer had to stand watch. She was protected.

Then, as the hand drew away, serenity vanished abruptly. Looking at her mother, Lee marveled that the bliss of seconds before could have come from that hand, that woman. There was her familiar mother, cheeks sucked in, stomach concave. “How was your flight, lovie?” Sylvia asked.

Lee realized that with Jazz by her side, she was now lovie, so she answered: “Not bad. But the little plane we had to change to …” She saw she had lost her mother’s interest and rubbed her middle and little fingers against the solidity of her brand-new
wedding band. Golden magic: She could face anything. But what was there to face? Sylvia was thrilled with her new son-in-law: For the Jew who prays for a Christmas gift, could there be any present better?

But, Lee conceded, her mother did not look well. True, Sylvia appeared normal standing in the foyer, regarding Jazz’s scuffed loafers and, not unpredictably, gratified by them. Freshly polished shoes would have shown weakness, a pathetic need to please. Lee studied her mother as she stood, lightly brushing the outside corners of her mouth with the tips of her pinkies as if smoothing out some minuscule flaw in her lip liner. But her left eye had a staccato tic. Blink, blink, blink. It couldn’t stay open. And she was swaying slightly, first left, then right, then back again. Was she dizzy from medication? Reeling from shock: How could you betray me like this? Elope! Deprive me of consultations with the caterer at the St. Regis and Jackie Onassis’s calligrapher!

Blink, blink, blink. Left, right, left. But then the next sway to the right was greater than the one before. Sylvia would have crashed against the doorpost and cracked her head if Jazz had not been quick. In a single balletic motion, he was by her side, grabbing her elbow, rotating her one hundred eighty degrees, escorting her into the living room. “A piano!” he was saying, while he lowered her into a bamboo chair with giant pink hibiscuses printed on the white cushions. “If you want to get rid of your houseguests, I can play my famous Christmas carol medley. They’ll swim home.”

“Oh, God!” Sylvia suddenly cried, as if he had made whatever pain she was in ten times worse. Behind her, by the picture window facing an inner courtyard, a Christmas tree, brilliant with thousands of tiny lights, was hung with hibiscus and frangipani blossoms. Real flowers. They were dying, their petals drooping and brown-edged.

Jazz, stunned by the drama of her outburst, tried to make a joke of it. “All right, I swear. No Christmas carols.”

“You have no idea,” Sylvia said, staring up into his eyes. “This is a disaster.”

Understandably, Lee thought she had retracted her initial welcome and was now referring to the marriage. Pressure built up on the sides of her head until it felt her skull was about to explode. So she could not make a quick comeback, or any comeback at all. It was Jazz who asked: “What’s a disaster?” clearly secure that whatever the nature of the catastrophe, it had nothing to do with him.

In fact, it did not. “Bob and Bobbie Prager canceled at the last minute,” Sylvia said. “They didn’t even call. They just didn’t show up at the airport. And the Gilliams were there with us, waiting at the gate. We were the only people who hadn’t boarded. Leonard was trying not to show that he wasn’t …” Sylvia lifted her hands. They were trembling. She could not find words to describe the depth of her husband’s horror. “He called their apartment and the man—houseman, butler—said they were in Sun Valley. Skiing. And he had to come back and put on a good face to the Gilliams. ‘Bob and Bobbie can’t make it. Some last minute hitch.’ I thought he was going to have a stroke. Two first-class tickets wasted.”

“Daddy paid for their tickets?” Lee asked.

“That’s how it’s done,” Sylvia explained, unwilling to meet Lee’s eyes. “For a minute,” she told the giant ceiling fan, “I swear to God, I thought the Gilliams were going to cancel.”

“But they’re here,” Jazz said soothingly.

Sylvia kept her head tilted back. “In the dining room. With Daddy—and Ira. Ira! We tried to get them to go to California, but they wouldn’t. And Ira is here. Oh God in heaven, Polly Gilliam writes about outerwear for
Vogue
and he has a goatee and is very important.”

“Where’s Robin?”

“Not feeling well.”

Sylvia’s face, made poreless and flawless by exorbitantly priced foundation extracted from the placentas of white lambs, remained trained on the laconic revolving blades of the fan, although several times she did manage to turn her eyes back to Jazz. The point of her tongue slid out to moisten her lips, but it too was dry.

“Sylvia!” Leonard’s voice called out. Even a stranger could hear the desperation behind the near-hysterical bonhomie. “Is that Lee-lee and Jasper?”

Sylvia nodded slowly and carefully, as though her head weighed several hundred pounds. Lee, who had not called herself Lee-lee since before her third birthday and who could recall no previous instance of either parent using that name, was so agitated she could not respond. How could she get herself and Jazz out of this nightmare? More to the point, the incipient prosecutor within her demanded, how could she have been so demented as to think Christmas week in St. Bart’s with her family should be the place to begin a marriage?

“Lee-lee?”

Jazz answered for her. “We’re here!” he called brightly.

And Leonard, as if blasted from a rocket launcher, shot into the living room. “Lee!” he called, flinging out his arms in a come-my-children flourish. “Jasper!” Jazz, watching what Lee did, the way a person faced with eating snails for the first time observes a tablemate, leaned in toward Leonard and allowed himself to be gathered into a desperate embrace. “Wonderful!”

“Hi,” Jazz said. Because Jazz was significantly taller, his father-in-law was still saying “Wonderful!” into his neck. “I don’t know exactly what to say,” Jazz went on. “I mean, dropping in on you. It’s not just like for a drink. It’s like: Oh, hello and Merry Christmas and so nice of you to let us have our honeymoon here.”

“Wonderful!” Leonard was still saying as Lee and Jazz managed to pull themselves out of his hug. “Couldn’t be happier. So glad you came.” With Jazz now a couple of feet away, Leonard was able to look up at him. Soak him in. His face began to flush with pleasure. And then he spotted his wife. His color ebbed. “Sylvia!”

“What?”

“They’re waiting.”

“I know.” But her eyes darted left and right, searching for what they were waiting for.

“Well …?”

“Urn,” she responded.

“Sylvia!”

“What?”
she begged him, clearly at a loss.

“‘What?’
Leonard repeated. “Oh, God, don’t tell me. Oh, God!” His hands clutched at his fashionable thick sideburns. He might have actually pulled them out had he not caught sight of Jazz. “I’m so sorry you have to be here at a time—”

“It’s okay,” Jazz smiled. Could nothing affect his easygoing nature? Why wasn’t he saying to himself: How the hell can I extricate myself from this lunatic family—Lee included? Can I get a fucking annulment in time to get home to Christmas dinner with people who have as their birthright the competence to decorate a tree properly? Je-sus! Dead flowers! Lee watched in wonder as Jazz rested his hand on her father’s shoulder, the reassuring masculine touch a catcher would offer a rattled pitcher. Leonard stopped yanking on his hair and dropped his hands to his sides. Still, he remained agitated and looked from Jazz to Sylvia, his expression changing from longing to loathing.

“Dad?” Leonard glanced in Lee’s direction, surprised, as if he had forgotten she had come to St. Bart’s with Jazz.

“You have no idea,” was all he could say.

“Robin?” Lee asked.

“The tip of the iceberg.” Leonard rammed his hands deep into the pockets of his white linen trousers.

“Those people who didn’t show up?”

Leonard’s dark eyes narrowed into menacing slits at this reminder. “They’re nothing,” he said, trying to sound dismissive and, of course, not succeeding. His eyes narrowed even more, so that all light in them was cut off; he was furious at Lee for such a bitter reminder. “Social climbers,” he mumbled to Jazz. “You know?”

Jazz nodded in weary commiseration, as if this were something he and his father-in-law were doomed to suffer every day. “What’s going on?” he inquired.
Don’t!,
Lee wanted to shout. Don’t set him off! “Something wrong down here?”